CLUSTER M71B
Biotechnology and Society
Also listed as SOC GEN M71B: the same class, and each department holds its own seats and its own grade history.
This is a year, not a class
Clusters run across three quarters, fall, winter, then the spring seminar, and UCLA counts the credit on completing the yearlong cluster: four GE requirements and the Writing II requirement. Signing up for the first quarter is signing up for the year.
Dibs only reads Winter 2027, so the later parts show no sections here: that is this term, not the sequence ending. What you keep if you take only part of a cluster is a question for the Cluster Program, not something these numbers answer.
Grades
3.78
Average grade awarded in CLUSTER M71B. Not a student rating: this is what the grades were.
In the A range
84%
of the 949 letter grades
D, F or W
0.6%
of every letter grade awarded, plus withdrawals
Taken pass/no pass
<1%
1 of 1 student passed
The registrar's own records: 949 grades over 4 terms, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Every instructor is pooled here.
What is inside that record
No summer session is in that record.
The table below splits them, and term averages across those 4 terms ran 3.68 to 3.90.
Historical grades for all professors, across recorded terms. The course summary above includes all professors.
- A+ 175 · 18.4%
- A 492 · 51.8%
- A- 130 · 13.7%
- B+ 48 · 5.1%
- B 59 · 6.2%
- B- 21 · 2.2%
- C+ 6 · 0.6%
- C 9 · 0.9%
- C- 3 · 0.3%
- D+ 2 · 0.2%
- D 1 · 0.1%
- D- 2 · 0.2%
- F 1 · 0.1%
- P 1 of 955
- I 5 of 955
Percentages are of the 949 letter grades. Grey bars are non-letter outcomes: passes (P) and incompletes (I).
How the non-letter outcomes are counted
They are excluded from the GPA entirely rather than scored, because counting a P as a 4.0 would be a fabrication.
By instructor
| Instructor | Predicted GPA | Raw | n | Terms | A range | Workload | Winter 2027 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LEE, RACHEL C reviews ↗ | 3.81 | 3.81 | 701 | 3 | 86% | light | not teaching it |
| RENSEL, MICHELLE A reviews ↗ | 3.70 | 3.70 | 501 | 2 | 79% | very light | not teaching it |
| VAUGHN, RACHEL ANN reviews ↗ | 3.70 | 3.70 | 501 | 2 | 79% | light | not teaching it |
| SCROGGINS, MICHAEL JASON reviews ↗ | 3.69 | 3.68 | 248 | 1 | 77% | light | not teaching it |
Why Predicted is not the Raw average
“Predicted” is shrunk toward the course average, which is itself shrunk toward the department, so an instructor with a handful of students sits near the course mean rather than topping the list.
Grade records describe outcomes. For what a course is like to take, read student reviews written on dibs below or follow the separate external review link.
Workload and assignments
Work types reported in BruinWalk reviews of this course, across recorded instructors and terms. They may differ from this term's syllabus.
What the work looks like
- Exams mentioned, no number given, said by 7 reviewers
- Papers mentioned, no number given, said by 1 reviewer
- Projects mentioned, no number given, said by 1 reviewer
Read from 28 reviews 26 days ago. dibs counts only what a review actually states, so a kind of work nobody mentioned is absent rather than zero.
What comes first
dibs has not read a class page for CLUSTER M71B in any term it holds, so it cannot say what comes before it.
Counted in courses rather than quarters: dibs does not know which of them a department lets you take together.
In Winters
Ran in 4 of the last 4 Winters.
From the terms dibs holds, which start in Fall 2021 and exclude summer. A department can run a course in a quarter it never has before.
From the registrar's catalog
(Same as Society and Genetics M71B.) Lecture, three hours; discussion, two hours. Enforced requisite: course M71A. Limited to first-year freshmen. Exploration of methods, applications, and implications of biotechnology and of ethical, social, and political implications as well as biological underpinnings. P/NP or letter grading.
Sections in Winter 2027
From the people who took it
Student reviews
What taking CLUSTER M71B was like: the work, the teaching, and what students wish they’d known.
Your experience could be the first.
No student reviews are available to read on dibs for this course yet. Took it? Tell the next person what helped, what was hard, and how you spent your time.
Looking for more perspectives?
External reviews are separate and do not count toward the dibs rating.